Associate Professor Adam Powell IV will speak on renewable energy and metal production during a special lecture March 24 at the annual meeting of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS). 

Powell, a faculty member in the WPI Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, was selected by TMS for an award lecture in the meeting’s extraction and processing division. His lecture is titled “Energy-Intensive Metal Processing in the Age of Low-cost Intermittent Renewables.”

“It is an honor to be chosen to speak at the TMS meeting, and I am delighted to describe the research my group has been doing at WPI to determine how renewable energy sources can be used in cleaner metal processing,” Powell said. 

Powell’s talk will describe an optimization framework and algorithm for determining the best times of day and parts of the year to operate large-scale metal production operations using electricity generated by intermittent solar and wind sources. Powell’s group has found that in emerging energy landscapes, low capital costs and flexibility can be more important to metal production than energy efficiency.

The TMS annual meeting will run March 23–27 in Las Vegas. WPI faculty members and students are expected to speak and present research at about 30 technical sessions.